In his best songs - 2012’s “Balthazar’s Song,” 2016’s “Heart Like a Levee,” 2019’s “I Need a Teacher” - these two spheres collide, each one informing the other. The central tension in Taylor’s music is the gulf between two distinct emotional zones: one, a brooding world of midlife angst and parental anguish the other, a peaceful refuge of familial bliss and vivid Southern landscapes.
6 InsurrectionĮmotional heart trouble is a helpful way of thinking about Hiss Golden Messenger as a whole. Why Hiss Golden Messenger Changed Their American Flag Album Cover After the Jan. Taylor has a nervous, reflexive laugh that tends to surface right after he says something particularly intense, as when, discussing his father’s recent heart attack, he says, “Emotional heart trouble is big in my life, but shit, so is physical heart trouble.” For me, to have this reminder offers a path towards not going through that in quite the same way again.” The biggest danger that we have in our lives is forgetting how hard or complicated something was. It was amazing and terrifying, but great. “Making this record was an absolute ball I was trying to get my meds right, and nobody really knew that, so I’d be going into the bathroom and having all these weird side effects and would be trying to shake it off and splash water on my face, and then go back out into the tracking room. “I’m not putting this record out under any sort of duress,” he continues. During the making of Terms of Surrender, he started seeing a therapist for the first sustained period of time in his life, and it’s helped him “understand that it’s OK to have these feelings of anxiety, and that there are ways to let them pass through you and not destroy you.” Taylor has made several personal strides since the period chronicled on Terms of Surrender. “Mama, I’m standing on the ledge-i-o,” he mumbles, as if to obscure what he’s saying, on “Down at the Uptown.” “Run, jump or fly? I think I caught a bad one.” Typically, after Taylor writes an album, he goes back and tweaks his lyrics “ever so slightly, to make it something that I’m going to be able to sing every night.” Terms of Surrender did not go through such a process. Terms of Surrender, Hiss Golden Messenger’s latest collection, documents - in sometimes frighteningly honest specifics - the crushing lows and precious saving graces of this turbulent time. And he continued to struggle with what he calls the “spiritually complicated” parts of being a touring musician, the parts that involve spending a healthy chunk of the year away from his wife and children.
The meds Taylor had been taking for his depression, which had gotten worse in recent years, were simply not working. He went through a “pretty huge interpersonal drama” with a close friend (chronicled, in part, on his new song “Katy (You Don’t Have to Be Good Yet”)). As Phil Cook, who’s become Taylor’s right-hand multi-instrumentalist (Cook’s words: “a sous chef in the kitchen of Mike Taylor”), puts it: “Mike has got a prolific bone to pick with the universe.”īut after several years of incessant gigging, recording, and writing, Taylor’s life ground to a halt in 2018. Taylor has grown his following, in part, by churning out an unusually large quantity of music, releasing nearly an album per year during the past decade. Perhaps not coincidentally, Hiss Golden Messenger have became a favorite among fellow musicians, adored by everyone from Mumford and Sons and the Hold Steady to Jenny Lewis and the National’s Aaron Dessner, the latter two of whom appear on Taylor’s new record. Taylor’s music turns the most banal of musician woes - the tribulations of life on the road, spending extended periods of time away from family- into gorgeous meditations on love and lack. Since 2008, when Taylor self-released a collection of off-kilter folk tunes called Country Hai East Cotton, the Durham, North Carolina–based Hiss Golden Messenger has evolved into one of the most vital roots-music projects of the past decade - part solitary singer-songwriter outlet, part communal roots-rock collective. But, you know, if I die somewhere out there on the road, what do I want my last sung words to be? That was definitely something that was on my mind.” “These tunes are, in part, imagined conversations that I am having with the people that are close to me, as something to leave behind, almost a last-testament type thing. “I had this feeling that I could not shake that maybe I’m not going to be around for much longer, that maybe something’s going to happen to me,” Taylor says.
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